The Technologists (12 page)

After being examined by President Rogers, Edwin was permitted to skip freshman status and left Harvard to be placed with the Technology Class of 1868.

The only part of the sublime Tech schedule Edwin dreaded as a sophomore was Military Drill Day, which the Institute was required to conduct for freshmen and sophomores as the price for receiving a federal grant for their plot of land. After the first session, Edwin nearly decided he had made a mistake leaving the comfortable Cambridge confines of Harvard. The dusty marching, made worse by the sandy wasteland surrounding the college, severely irritated his throat, nor could he keep pace with his faster classmates. Marcus Mansfield, whom Edwin had encountered briefly in the laboratory, had been exempt—having already been a volunteer for the army during the war—but he went outside
and helped Edwin with the formations, earning the younger man’s eternal gratitude.

“You know Greek and Latin,” Marcus said casually one day as he coached him.

“How did you know?”

“Oh, Bob Richards. He said you two were in the same preparatory academy together before college.”

“Yes, though I never thought he noticed me. Not that he was a snob, mind you! Only, I wasn’t the most popular boy at our academy.”

Though his countenance resisted reading, Edwin suspected Marcus was timid about what he really wanted to say.

“
Technology
. I’ve wondered about it—about the word,” Marcus finally murmured.

Edwin didn’t make Marcus say more. “
Techne
means ‘art,’
logos
can be interpreted as ‘sciences.’ The science of the practical arts, you might say.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hoyt.”

“Edwin. Please call me Edwin. May I ask you something? They say you were on the machines.”

“Who did?”

“Well, I think his name is Tilden. I gather he’s a friend of yours.”

Marcus smirked. “Only for a few minutes as freshmen.”

“Will you tell me what it feels like to have the machine in your power?”

“Monotonous. Every year the machines improve, and there is less and less to think about in their operation. At first, it becomes a part of you, then you become a part of it.”

Now, as Edwin grappled with his ideas on heat, something new was in the air at Tech. In the long corridors, talk turned to the future with the slightest prompting. So much would be finished. There would be no more convening at the start of a new year teasing friends about new styles of neckties and mustaches. No more summers volunteering for mining companies or in a naval yard, surveying caves and mountains, inspecting the construction of ironworks or paper mills. No more sitting on these hard steps. Soon—in two months—they would leave the Institute and begin life after college, what they had worked toward these last four years. A college term had never passed so swiftly. The members of Tech
’69, ’70, and ’71 looked on with special interest, envious of their positions but also thankful Edwin and the fourteen other ’68 boys—
men
, perhaps, maybe
gentlemen
, daresay—would be the pioneers. The most daring experiments produced from the Institute so far: graduates.

Marcus carried out his tin of food. He sat down with a nod as Edwin made room next to him. He looked almost as distracted as Edwin was as they both stared out into the fields. Their company alone put each a little at ease without having to say a word—about the reluctant rivalry with Hammie, on Edwin’s mind, or about whatever it was that made Marcus appear as if he had just seen a ghost.

“I suppose we should go secure our seats in Watson’s class,” Edwin said after a while, checking the time.

“It’s begun,” Marcus whispered.

Edwin was about to object, looking at his watch again, but then heard the footsteps approaching and looked up, nearly dropping the heirloom in his hand. A dozen, maybe fifteen, blue-garbed policemen were heading right toward their building in a double-quick march.

W
ILLIAM
R
OGERS HAD CHANGED HIS LIFE
,
had shown himself the most original man Marcus had ever known, had built an institute that could be the pathway to the future for the whole country. Still, he was wrong this time, wrong to yield to Eliot and the others.
Rogers was wrong
. The words finally confronted Marcus as he rode back to Newburyport that evening. They were not easy words to come by, even contemplating them silently to himself, and he realized they had never before appeared in his thoughts.

No institution in existence had the resources Tech did to inquire into scientific causes. They were even preparing the first laboratory of physics in the country. Perhaps offering to help would indeed provoke criticism from those who distrusted any new sciences, but what if it did? Was it not worth it in order to identify the scientific means that had led to such unthinkable acts? Was that not their moral responsibility?

Now Agassiz had turned the police into his puppets, no doubt directing their visit to the Institute. The entire afternoon, uniformed men wandered up and down their halls, interrupting classes to ask professors what they were teaching, standing at the back of the laboratories as students tried to concentrate on their experiments, obstructing freshmen on the stairs and asking at random if they had learned anything “dangerous,” “strange,” or “suspicious” lately. Albert Hall shook in his boots as one patrolman leaned over his shoulder, poking confusedly at his test tubes and beakers.

“And what’s this?”

“A blowpipe,” Albert said meekly.

“A what?”

“It’s an instrument that safely communicates gas into a mixture,” Albert explained.

“What’s in this one now?” another of the policemen said as he recklessly picked up a glass crucible at Hammie’s station.

“Nothing much,” Hammie said, with a lurking grin. “Sulfur and saltpeter. I’ve just mixed it.”

“Well!” the policeman said, unimpressed.

“Here,” Hammie said. “You may add this dash of carbon to it if you like.”

“Perhaps that’s not the best idea,” Marcus said, swiping the vessel Hammie was reaching for from the shelf. Then he whispered aside to his classmate, “Are you mad, Hammie?”

“How?” Hammie replied defensively.

“Sulfur, saltpeter, carbon? You’re about to have him manufacture gunpowder!”

He didn’t deny it. “They deserve a little explosion,” Hammie said, sulking.

Hammie aside, most of the students and professors tried to go about their business as though everything were normal. There was no indication the police would come back again the next day, but to Marcus the passivity of the faculty was unforgivable.

When he calmed down enough to open his notebook to study during the train ride back to Newburyport, a note slipped onto his lap. It was a sketch of the Charles River exquisite enough to have been rendered by a professional surveyor. At the bottom, in Bob’s hand, it indicated to meet at seven the next morning. Marcus sighed—he did not know if he had much taste for rowing after their last time out and after all the serious news since. But before the train reached Newburyport, he had decided he would meet Bob, as requested. He had not talked about the faculty meeting with Edwin as they ate their dinners on the steps—Edwin appeared occupied enough, and Marcus still was contemplating the debate he had witnessed. But he would talk about it with Bob.

Though his personal circumstances could not have been more different from Marcus’s, Bob had made Marcus feel as if he understood him from the first time they spoke. They had been freshmen, but more than that, since they were the first class and therefore the only students. They
considered themselves princes, involved in the greatest overthrow of an old and worn-out system since the destruction of tea in 1773—in this case, the classical education they and their professors were kicking out the window.

In those weeks after the Institute opened in temporary space rented from the Mercantile Library while the construction of the building was under way, Marcus had habitually found an empty corner of the lecture room in which to sit alone and do his work during dinner. His stepfather hadn’t been too far from the mark when he had predicted that, whatever Rogers promised to the contrary, nobody would want him at the college. “Factory boy! You there, factory boy!” This time the taunt was issued not in a sneaking whisper but in a booming, unapologetic voice. Still, Marcus wouldn’t turn his head. A paper dart glided over him and landed rather gracefully between his boots. He picked it up and studied it. “Notice the lower corners are folded up to the middle—that provides far better flying velocity. My own design. My governess looked like a porcupine by the end of a lesson, with her hair filled with these—but then again the old girl looked like a porcupine without help.” Marcus now faced a tall, handsome young man, with an air of brashness and familiarity in his wide smile, as though the two young men had known each other all their lives.

“Is that really what they’ve been calling you?” the stranger went on. “Factory boy? Is it intended to be insulting? Goodness! I’d as soon walk through fire as take that as an insult.” Marcus asked the stranger why. “It means you’ll be more of a machine man than any of us can learn to be from a classroom,” the young man said blandly, stretching his hand out. “Mansfield, right? Bob Hallowell Richards, by the way. You are the one who took Tilden by the neck. He is jackassable. I’ve been wanting to do the same thing since we were five years old. They are afraid of you, old boy, only because you belong here. Fellows like me, on the other hand … How my father would toss and turn below the dirt of Mount Auburn to know I chose the Institute over Harvard. Here, have one. Not a smoker? Well, come anyway—you can finish my dinner while I have a puff before mechanical drawing.”

“What makes you think I want your dinner?”

The truth was, he was living on about a dollar a week. He had to
spend most of his small store of money on the books and papers he needed for classes, and food was the first thing he sacrificed, since his stepfather deemed his lodging enough charity.

“I know because I watch. That is what I do and have done since I was a boy, spying on the habits of the birds and animals, before long learning what every twitch and movement of the frog’s eye meant. You take small bites from the same biscuit throughout the day.”

“I’m not a frog,” replied Marcus bitterly.

“Understood. You aren’t letting me go alone, right?”

*   *   *

N
OW HE WAS FOLLOWING
Bob Richards again. Marcus arrived back in Boston safely before the appointed hour and followed the map along the riverbank. He thought he was at the approximate meeting spot, but did not find Bob or Edwin or the shell and he was about to give up. Then a hand shot out of the bushes, pulling him down and in.

“Quiet! Stop breathing so loudly, won’t you, Mansfield?” came a whisper from low in the thicket.

“What are you doing, Bob?” Marcus asked, then stopped when he heard a noise. “Why is he here?”

A few feet away, Hammie also crouched in the grass. Hammie’s distinctive silhouette was easily identified even in the low light of dawn.

“Eddy wouldn’t come and I needed a third hand for my operation,” Bob answered. “Hammie was the perfect choice.”

“I thought we were rowing!”

“Now, keep calm, Mansfield. Don’t grow warm with me this morning. It’s an important and, moreover,
just
cause.”

“You know with graduation so close I cannot afford even a trifling breach of order, much less whatever it is you’re planning with
him
. That lunatic nearly tried to blow up a policeman yesterday for sport!”

Bob motioned him to keep his voice quiet and looked over at Hammie, who was occupied sorting through a chemical case and did not seem to have heard.

“I told you to come out for your benefit alone,” Bob insisted.

“Mine?” Marcus asked skeptically.

“I didn’t want to deprive you of any pleasure, old boy. Does that surprise you, even after four years of bosom friendship? Don’t worry—if we’re caught, I’ll tell them you and Hammie tried to stop me. You’ll be heroes!”

“I don’t want to be a hero,” Marcus grumbled.

“Then just enjoy the scenery,” Bob said, peering down at the river before turning back to Marcus. “Besides, if they find us and start a set-to, I’ll need you. Eddy’s too much of a dig—he would run away. You know his blasted philosophy in life is live and let live and wait for God to sort it all out. He’s a noncontroversialist. Not you. I heard you finally used Tilden up; at least that is what the rumor-mongering freshmen say. I wish I could have been there. One thing, though. He can lie and tell them you struck him on college property, you know.”

“I don’t think he will. He’d have to admit he was licked, and he wouldn’t do that, even if it meant my being shipped off.”

“Lucky God gave you the fists of a prizefighter!”

He bowed his head. “I’m not proud of striking him. Well, maybe a little. I was mad as thunder, Bob.”

“Say, what puts you in such a brown study this morning? That little social call yesterday from the men in blue?”